> Evolution will select out poor technology, either at the market stage or at the functional stage.
If evolution could select out poor technology we wouldn't have MS Windows. In fact, it's rather rare for the best solution from a technological standpoint to win out. It has a lot more to do with scale, influence, market share, and making the right deals. Competition only selects for the best in a reasonably healthy market, which we haven't had in the tech space in quite some time.
> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles.
> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?
I've wondered about this myself. People keep talking about the trades as a good path in the post-AI world, but I just don't see it. If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be hiring all these tradesmen?
If I were unemployed long-term, the one upside is that I would suddenly have the time to a do a lot of the home repairs that I've been hiring contractors to take care of.
The other thing I worry about is the level of violence we're likely to see if a significant chunk of the population is made permanently unemployed. People bring up Universal Basic Income as a potential, but I think that only address a part of the issue. Despite the bluster and complaints you might hear at the office, most want to have the opportunity to earn a living; they want to feel like they're useful to their fellow man and woman. I worry about a world in which large numbers of young people are looking at a future with no job prospects and no real place for them other than to be made comfortable by government money and consumer goods. To me that seems like the perfect recruiting ground for all manner of extremist organizations.
> I just said I’ve never heard anyone say they want to abolish the police, which sounds absurd to me.
Well, now you've heard it. And you're right, it sounds absurd. I wish it were satire, but there are people in positions of power here in the U.S. who think this is good policy.
If someone in power said that they intended to defund this or that government department, most listeners would reasonably infer that the speaker's intention is to get rid of that department. You're accusing people of moving the goalposts when all they're doing is taking the most straightforward, plain language interpretation of the phrase, "defund the police". It was the activists who picked the slogan, not everyone else.
> You could also look at it from the opposite perspective: the military is now too powerful for private ownership of guns to do much and the downsides of having gun ownership now outweigh the nonexistent benefits
Tell that to the Taliban or the Vietnamese. They took on a massively more powerful military, were significantly outgunned, and came out of it in control of their respective countries. If there's anything we can learn from history it's that war is incredibly chaotic and unpredictable, and that anyone making bold and confident predictions is just about guaranteed to have reality prove them wrong.
> I have never in my life heard or read anyone, of any social standing, political affiliation, education or station of life discuss the abolition of police entirely.
This makes sense. If one of your political platforms is to weaken and reduce the police force, then buying a gun is a very logical and practical thing to do.
> The people who wrote this article seem out of touch with the topic they chose to pretend to be experts about?
This is quickly becoming the norm for experts, unfortunately. I keep seeing more an more people with educational expertise in something that they have zero hands-on or practical experience with.
I remember being at a social event once and chatting with someone who was a business professor at any Ivy League university. Making small talk, I asked him which companies he'd worked at, and he told me that he had gone the academic track and started teaching during and after getting his PhD (in exactly what I don't remember). I remember being stunned that students would pay over $60k a year to learn about business from someone who'd never worked for or started a business.
> The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?
I keep seeing arguments like this. They sound like a bit like a form of nihilsm. Do you really think we shouldn't worry about risks to the environment simply because we're all hypocrites on that front in one way or another? I get the frustration and have been guilty of using this type of argument myself in the past, but refusing to discuss a problem because the people raising the concern are imperfect human beings doesn't seem like a tenable position.
> Think how many normies have come online since then that have only ever used a smartphone. Sadly the average computer literacy of those times are gone.
I remember a few years ago, being shocked to see that over 50% of applicants for a software engineering role applied directly from their smartphones. So it's not even just normies who see their phone as "the computer".
> The salary they pay is double the median for car mechanics. You still think that's not paying enough?
It's not up to me to decide if a given employer does or does not pay enough. If people don't want to work for your company, then you're not paying enough relative to your expectations around the job. That's not anyone's opinion, it's just how prices work.
Anytime a company says it "can't" fill positions, it's because they're not paying enough, they're unwilling to train, or both. One those few things in life that really is that simple.
> I know this is silly but the biggest thing that’s driving me away from it is how god awfully blurry it looks on my 1440p screen :/
Not silly at all. User experience is important. If you're going to spend as much time in a tool as most programmers do in their editors, it should look and feel nice.
If evolution could select out poor technology we wouldn't have MS Windows. In fact, it's rather rare for the best solution from a technological standpoint to win out. It has a lot more to do with scale, influence, market share, and making the right deals. Competition only selects for the best in a reasonably healthy market, which we haven't had in the tech space in quite some time.